votive, wix, vsip, and all things microsoft : Miscellanea

Just upgraded to Verizon FiOS from Comcast Blast

jrock — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 10:17:07 GMT

I've been using Comcast PowerBoost (6Mbps download / 768 Kbs upload) for about a year and have been pretty happy with it. The speed was fine and the price was good at $33/month. (Although I had to keep calling to get them to lower the price after the promotional price kept expiring). Comcast recently upgraded my neighborhood to fiber optic and so the new Blast service was available. I called them up and they just flipped a switch internally to unlock the higher speeds. I was getting roughly 12.5 Mbs download and 3 Mbs upload. The advertised rate was supposed to be 16/2, but I never got more than about 12.5. The upload was faster than advertised, though.

Well, Verizon also upgraded our neighborhood with fiber optic cabling, so I was also able to get their new FiOS service. It was cheaper for a faster rate especially since I already have my phone service with them, so I thought I'd give it a try. The installation went pretty smoothly, although it takes a while because they actually bring fiber optic cabling right to your house. It just worked, though, which is great. The speed is exactly what they're advertising - I'm getting just barely under 20Mbs download and 5.5Mbs upload (advertised was 20/5). Blazing fast and it's much faster than the Comcast Burst service.

Here are my speed test results using Comcast Burst...

And with Verizon FiOS...

How to escape a leading # within the C preprocessor

jrock — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 00:33:06 GMT

This is probably a no-brainer for most people, but for some reason I banged my head against the wall for about an hour trying to figure this one out.

Background

Oftentimes you have source files (or in our case aspx files) that contain common headers, footers, sections, etc. Instead of paying the runtime hit of dynamically including things within the page, we just use the C preprocessor to #define macros that get expanded at build time. For example, do you ever get sick of writing the <!DOCTYPE> at the top of the page or want to make sure that it's consistent across all of your pages? Well, it's easy to do if you use a C preprocessor macro:

#define XHTML_DOCTYPE_DECLARATION <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> \    
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

Then in your .aspx page simply do this:

XHTML_DOCTYPE_DECLARATION

and voilà.

Problem

Well, what if you have something like this in your .aspx.pp page (we use a .pp extension to indicate that it's a C preprocessor file that will get renamed after the preprocessor runs):

<style type="text/css"> #element { background-color: white; } </style>

The C preprocessor will barf at you and say something like the following:

fatal error C1021: invalid preprocessor command 'element'

Solution

There are a couple different ways of fixing this, although I think the simplest way is to just define a macro that just passes through its argument, like this:

#define IGNORE_HASH(x) x

Then you change the code to this:

<style type="text/css"> IGNORE_HASH(#element) { background-color: white; } </style>

Now the C preprocessor ignores the #element and everything works as expected.

Hilarious video about what it's like to work here at Microsoft

jrock — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 02:13:00 GMT

This is a pretty realistic video of what it's like to work here. :)

http://on10.net/blogs/tina/Life-At-Microsoft/

SyncToy 1.4 and Vista 64-bit (x64) Error

jrock — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 03:35:00 GMT

I use the extremely useful SyncToy to mirror my data between various machines at home. However, it did not work on Vista x64. I found this very handy blog post which tells you how to fix the problem. I didn't feel like installing Windows Network Monitor 3.1, so I decompiled it using dark and extracted the needed file out of the msi. I'm attaching it here for anybody that's interested.

Here's an example of the error that you'll see if you have the problem:

Problem signature:
  Problem Event Name: CLR20r3
  Problem Signature 01: synctoy.exe
  Problem Signature 02: 1.4.0.0
  Problem Signature 03: 453f990b
  Problem Signature 04: SqmManagedWrapper
  Problem Signature 05: 1.4.0.0
  Problem Signature 06: 453f9909
  Problem Signature 07: 8
  Problem Signature 08: 38
  Problem Signature 09: System.BadImageFormatException
  OS Version: 6.0.6000.2.0.0.256.1
  Locale ID: 1033

Here's how to fix the problem:

Rename custsat.dll in the installation directory for SyncToy (C:\Users\[YourLoginName]\AppData\Local\SyncToy\ by default) to custsat.dll.original so that you can restore the file if you want.
Copy the custsat.dll file attached to this blog post to C:\Users\[YourLoginName]\AppData\Local\SyncToy\ (or wherever you installed SyncToy).

That's it. You should be good to go now. I need to log a bug on this for the SyncToy team if one hasn't been logged already.

Shahar has waaay too much time on his hands :)

jrock — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 01:58:00 GMT

Check out this blog post from Shahar, one of the devs I work with.

http://blogs.msdn.com/cumgranosalis/archive/2007/08/21/code-art-like-ascii-art-only-sucks-so-much-more-to-create.aspx

Windows Vista RC2 has been released

jrock — Sun, 08 Oct 2006 08:18:00 GMT

I've been running RC1 for a little while now and I have been converted to Vista! It is very nice. RC2 has just been released and has some minor improvements and bug fixes. I'm downloading and installing it now. You can download it from http://download.windowsvista.com/preview/rc2/en/download.htm if you're interested in being on the bleeding edge.

A nice little article about defensive programming

jrock — Sat, 17 Dec 2005 03:21:00 GMT

Shahar Prish, one of my fellow teammates on the Excel Server (now called Excel Services by marketing) team has written a nice little article on defensive programming that I thought was pretty insightful. And no, I'm not Dev1, Dev2, or Dev3. :)

http://blogs.msdn.com/cumgranosalis/archive/2005/12/12/DefensiveProgramming1.aspx

Introductions

jrock — Thu, 28 Jul 2005 11:18:00 GMT

Well, I'm now a certified MSDN blogger. I've been meaning to do this for a long time, but just haven't gotten around to it.

First of all, let me give a little information about myself. I'm a developer at Microsoft working on the next version of Excel. Let me just tell you that it will be sweet and probably the biggest release of Office since Office 95. There are some amazing features that will really knock your socks off. This, of course, is my personal opinion and not "official" Microsoft PR (just wanted to get that legal part out of the way), although I'm sure that Microsoft would certainly agree with me [:D].

When I manage to get a free minute (which is hard with two kids under the age of 5 and a third on the way), I've spent the last year and a half working on Votive, which is the Visual Studio 2003 package for WiX. In that time I've gotten to know pretty well the VSIP 2003 SDK and all of the seemingly endless interfaces that one must implement to even plug into Visual Studio. I thought it might be nice to share some of what I've learned in a series of blogs in case anybody else out there is planning on writing custom Visual Studio packages.

Also, I'd like to lay out the roadmap of where I see Votive going and what kinds of things people can help out with if they're interested in contributing to the project. So, there's more to come in the next few weeks. Hopefully it will be useful. If so, let me know so I'm enthused about continuing to write these blogs. If not, I guess that's good to know, too. [;)]

Anyway, check back later for more info. I think the Votive roadmap will be next.